Sydney customer intelligence platform Local Measure has raised $4.5 million in funding from private investors and family offices to help expand across the US and the Middle East with new offices in Los Angeles and Dubai.

Despite it being only the first week of January, it has been a busy week around the startup world. Intel has acquired Ascending Technologies, while Activision Blizzard has acquired Major League Gaming to bolster its live streaming offering. Meanwhile, airport car rental startup Silvercar has raised $28 million in a Series C round led by Audi, and restaurant POS startup Toast has raised $30 million.

Our local fetish with funding rounds are the French Bulldog equivalent of artificial insemination. We are keeping companies alive that perhaps should not be around. With over 100 incubators in the country, we are fast reaching saturation point for synthetically created companies.

Australian venture capital firms, angel groups, incubators, accelerators and other industry stakeholders have pledged to open source the legal documents used in their seed fundraising processes. Industry-wide standardised fundraising documents can now be downloaded via AVCAL’s website and used during early-stage equity investment rounds.

Ten years ago, Chris Strode, Founder of Invoice2go, was living with his in-laws working full time and writing code from a desk set up in the bedroom. A lot has changed since then, his company employs 45 staff and services, and now has over 120,000 active users that send out of $10 billion worth of invoices, according to Strode when we sat down for a chat at Startup Daily yesterday.

Everyone keeps calling bellabox a beauty box company. It’s not. bellabox is a media company, no matter how you slice and dice it. That is why an investment from one of Australia’s fastest growing media companies makes perfect sense.

After winning Oxygen Ventures’ inaugural The Big Pitch competition, ECAL, the Melbourne-based ‘precision marketing’ platform for events, has secured $2 million in funding. ECAL tied in with WeTeachMe at the competition which was held on the 17th of June in Melbourne.